Wii U Is 'Just A Bit' More Powerful Than Current Consoles

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Questions about the specifications of Wii U continue to circulate, especially now that photos of the upcoming consoles are available. Eurogamer spoke to numerous developers building games for the consoles, and asked a simple question: "How powerful is the Wii U really?"

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"It's compared to the current generation and a bit more powerful than that," Blitz Games Studios' Design Director John Nash. Wii U offers 1GB of RAM, twice the amount of RAM available in Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The custom AMD 7 series GPU uses a more modern architecture and support for DirectX 10 and shader technology, and eDRAM is "embedded in the GPU custom chip in a similar way to Wii," Eurogamer confirmed.

However, the CPU has a lower clock speed than the Xbox 360's and PlayStation 3's, which may cause frame rate issues later, according to the developers.

Two Tribes, developer of Trine 2: Director's Cut, said that its Wii U release runs in 1080p. It added that the ability to use two GamePads, and therefore stream the game, does consume memory, though that did not seem to be a massive issue.

Nash added to Eurogamer that while the next-generation Xbox and PlayStation consoles may have greater power than Wii U, that is not the issue. He talked about Nintendo creating an experience and offering strong IPs. Microsoft and Sony meanwhile may bring in other, non-console devices that may cause problems. Wii U uses just the GamePad alongside the console.

"You build an experience based on what the machine's capable of, and you take advantage of what those machines have in terms of unique abilities. So for me its like, yeah, I'd be worried if I was briefed to produce a first-person shooter to the same quality that's going to appear on the next rev of PlayStation and Xbox," Nash added.